14,000 county voters have no polling place, must cast absentee ballots

About 14,000 Ventura County voters now live in precincts too small to qualify for polling places, a total that's grown by more than 70 percent as elections officials have created scores of miniprecincts to avoid errors.

Those voters must cast absentee ballots because they live in precincts with fewer than 250 voters. Officials took the step to avoid the kind of mistake that occurred in Santa Paula during the presidential general election in November 2008.

That year, an incumbent running for re-election to the board of the Santa Paula School District lost by one vote, possibly because poll workers may have given as many as 14 ballots to people who were ineligible to vote on that particular race since they lived in the Mupu School District.

Ofelia De La Torre, who lost her seat on the school board, said the defeat still hurts a bit.

"I am kind of upset because it was their error and nothing was done," she said.

The Santa Paula precinct was split, with the boundary between the two school districts running through the area.

Former elections chief Phil Schmit said he couldn't figure out who may have voted in the wrong race because ballots are secret. Afterward, he decided to abolish those types of precincts.

"We didn't want to take the chance of it happening a second time," said Schmit, who since has retired as county clerk and recorder.

Schmit said he was working on the change by the time the Ventura County Grand Jury urged officials to simplify the system in April 2009.

Although the mix-up occurred for a school district race, there were other precincts in which only a portion of the voters were eligible to vote for various water and sanitation boards.

Assistant Registrar of Voters Tracy Saucedo said those portions have now become separate precincts. She said elections officials had simplified some of the precincts in the past, but ramped up the effort after the mistake in Santa Paula.

"We went through and got rid of the portions," Saucedo said. "That created a lot of individual precincts."

The new vote-by-mail precincts are scattered throughout Ventura County, but a particularly high number were pushed into the category in the Ojai Valley because they already were small. The elections office began notifying voters in those precincts by mail over the past month.

Affected voters may mail in their ballots or deliver them in person to the county elections office at the Ventura County Government Center. They may also drop them off at any polling place in the county on Election Day.

They can still vote at county polling places, but their ballots are considered provisional, Saucedo said. Their choices won't be recorded in the official count until elections workers go through them in succeeding days or weeks.

Schmit said people in what are known as vote-by-mail precincts get free postage for their ballots. But that's still cheaper than the staff, security and transportation of equipment required for a polling place, he said.